Effective marketing training
pharmafile | December 3, 2008 | Feature | Business Services |Â Â careers, trainingÂ
When the UK's Olympics team came home from Beijing this summer, laden with a record haul of medals, the nation was delighted and surprised by the strength and depth of 'Team GB'.
Of particular note was how the UK had managed to punch above its weight in the competition. One of the most important pre-requisites for this success was the massive investment in training facilities and expertise which gave the country's athletes the winning edge.
Of course, when your job involves being the first to cross a defined finishing line, it could be said that devising an effective training regime is relatively straightforward. But the fact remains that to win requires a great investment of time and effort in preparation and training.
That's enough of the obvious sports metaphors – because we're here to talk about training in pharmaceutical marketing, and we all know that building a successful sales team is as difficult as Alex Ferguson's task.
We have become very good in our industry at measuring return on investment in just about everything that we do – marketing, research, sales. So why is it that so few pharma companies have a clear idea of what they are getting for the considerable sums of cash that go into training marketers?
To find the answer, we must first look at what motivates much of the training that is undertaken. Essentially there are two models to marketing training: the HR-driven approach, based on spending budgets to achieve the fulfilment of job specification and progression planning; and the alternative, more commercially driven view that marketing training should be a vehicle to increase the effectiveness of the brand.
Who gets the most value out of training marketers? It could be the marketing manager, because if it's done well, it will lead to a marketing team that is more capable of executing the marketing strategy and achieving the company's business goals – in addition to achieving the complementary goals of the HR manager.
To achieve this, however, marketing training needs to be much more specific to the needs of the brand. Rather than an A to Z of marketing approach, it needs to ask: "What are the specific issues relating to this brand that I need my team to be good at, so we can perform better, and be more productive?"
It has to be tailored, because each situation needs a completely different set of skills, and getting to that point requires a clear idea of both what's needed and what is missing when you start out. Really effective training should be about plugging that gap.
Knowing what you don't know
The US politician, Donald Rumsfeld, once notoriously said: "There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know." The thing is, you know what he means. The concept is also known as 'unconscious incompetence': If we are ignorant of an issue, sometimes we haven't got a grasp of how much we don't know about it, or how important it is.
Training needs to tackle these gaps in knowledge or experience. And yet to get to the point where the right person is doing the right training requires an awareness of those gaps – and that, as well as the training techniques themselves, is the key to success in this field.
Unfortunately, too many pharma marketers exist in a state of 'unconscious incompetence' – a warm, fuzzy place. We need to be dragging them into 'conscious incompetence' – a more uncomfortable place where they realise that their knowledge is incomplete. And equally importantly, they know what they need to know.
The path to making that switch is threefold: first work out what you need to do to make the brand a success. This should be the starting point of any marketing training plan, and not the more common approach of assessing individual or team competencies and trying to plug the gaps, without any reference to business needs.
The next step is to work out what competencies will be needed to achieve that success, viewed across the team as a whole. You don't necessarily need everyone in the team to be fantastic at every competency, because that will be over-engineering the training and wasteful in terms of time and money.
The third plank is to benchmark the skills and competencies of the team as a whole (and obviously this does require you to look at each individual within the team). This can be the hardest task of all, because often, even if you know what skills are needed by the brand as a whole, it is difficult to identify where the skills gaps lie.
As ever with benchmarking, it's always useful to look externally at how others have succeeded (or indeed failed) and try to learn the lessons from such case studies. These can equally be used in the training itself to reinforce the point.
Once you have surveyed the team's competencies (best done by talking the individuals on their perceived strengths and weaknesses, and their line managers), you can start translating the brand's needs into a team training needs analysis – which in turn leads to team and individual training plans.
The good thing about going about it this way is that it gives you a really good idea of what you need, where you are, and what the gap is, both within the team and the individual – and where you need to get to. What you are left with are very specific topics that people need to improve on – and therefore you can target your precious training budgets accordingly, rather than spreading them thinly and hoping that the training will be relevant somewhere along the line.
Evaluating training success
Given that we are regarding marketing training as a route to competitive strength, we should be measuring return on investment with exactly the same vigour as we would a marketing campaign. So how do you make sure the training you have put in place – at considerable cost in terms of both time and money – has been worthwhile?
Just as pharma training plans have often been limited in their outlook, so the evaluation which has accompanied them has been inadequate. I would argue that there are four levels of evaluation, and the more tailored and targeted the training, the more sophisticated the return on investment measures need to be.
The simplest evaluation is to ask delegates about their training experience. This takes the form of the ubiquitous 'happy sheet', verbal reactions and post-training surveys. Although these are quick, easy and cheap to obtain, gather and analyse, their usefulness is limited.
For a start, the trainee might feel unhappy if they have been challenged beyond their comfort zone, and yet this is precisely what good training will do. And this kind of evaluation is unduly influenced by other factors, such as the quality of the hotel in which the course was held and personal feelings towards the trainer.
The next level up is to test the learning itself. Measuring the increase in knowledge through testing can be a useful way of ensuring that knowledge transfer has occurred, and progression to the next stage can be made contingent on passing the test. This is relatively easy to set up, and for quantifiable skills is clear-cut, although this makes it less suitable for more complex learning.
More tailored and commercially useful training starts to be measured in the assessment of behaviours in those who have been trained – how learning has been applied once they are back on the job.
This kind of evaluation requires the co-operation and skills of line managers, who should be able to identify the desired impact. So, for example, if someone were learning competence in market access, what behaviours would you expect? You might expect the trained marketer to be actively trying to find out who the customers are, tailoring messages to them, and so on.
Then evaluation begins to measure how well the training has met the commercial needs rather than simply the competence need – although the behaviour will only happen if the competence need has been met.
In the end, the commercial results of training should be measurable if we are to accurately assess the real return on investment: the effect on the business itself. Of course, training is only one of the building blocks for results, so it is more difficult to know to what extent it is to credit for positive results (like trying to evaluate the effect of different elements in the marketing mix). But you can look at the before and after – if you can see a qualitative difference in the way a team or an individual succeeds in meeting the business needs of the brand.
Industry standard CPD?
If we as an industry are going to be taken seriously, shouldn't we perhaps follow healthcare professionals and have an industry standard continuing professional development (CPD) system, ensuring all pharma marketers receive regular training?
Attractive though the answer may be (especially to the Chartered Institute of Marketing, which promotes such an approach), my answer would be a firm: "No". Why? Because, as we have already seen, training is part of securing a competitive strength – and that means it can't be across the board.
Let's face it, if you were the business unit manager going down this road, you would be happier if nobody else was, because a quality marketing training programme should be a real source of potential competitive advantage. It also really drives the buy-in and participation of your brand team, because there is an awful lot of value in it for both organisation and individual.
But what about the issue of retention? It is true that in some markets, especially in south-east Asia, I will spend time with a company on training, go back a year later and they'll be gone – principally because they're so much more valuable because of what they have been through.
But staff retention is most effective when you can demonstrate that you value your staff – and there is no better way of doing that than encouraging them to buy into personal development which is both useful to them and tailored to the needs of their specific job.
You have to look at training as a long-term thing, rather than a one off. If your team knows they are being given a different commercial challenge each time, and the training to meet it – which is adding value to their own CV – they will feel valued and want to stay.
So, to gain competitive advantage, meet business needs and ensure the retention of staff, companies have to stay one step ahead of the competition, in training terms every bit as much as in commercial terms. (In fact, as we have seen, done properly the two are inextricably linked.) A standard industry CPD scheme would erase this point of differentiation.
Training for success
If effective marketing is about meeting unmet needs, then marketing training needs to do this as well. Only when we as an industry start creating training plans that are based on the needs of the brand, rather than on a HR-driven need to 'do some training', will we start to see a real return on our training budgets – and therefore start to use training to gain a competitive strength.
There is no better example of return on investment than this approach, because you are targeting your training spend where it's going to give you most commercial benefit – on the brand. It also means that everybody buys into it, because they can see the training plan is there to meet the need of the brand.
And although it doesn't have a tape across it, that's as good a finishing line as any, and for pharma marketers that should be as powerful an incentive as a small piece of gold on a ribbon is to an Olympian.
Four levels of evaluation
Reaction – measure how trainees felt about the training or learning experience.
Learning – measure the increase in knowledge through testing, to ensure that knowledge transfer has occurred.
Behaviours – measure the extent of applied learning once the trainee is back on the job.
Results – measure the return on investment: the effect on the business itself.
Gerard Doherty is a managing consultant and head of training and development at The MSI Consultancy. He can be contacted at gdoherty@msi.co.uk
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